•  3
    Representing or shaping reality? What 'class' can teach about 'woman'
    In Manuel Gustavo Isaac, Kevin Scharp & Steffen Koch (eds.), New Perspectives on Conceptual Engineering, Synthese Library. forthcoming.
    Haslanger (2000) has argued that we should ameliorate concepts of race or gender to better capture existing structural inequalities. Her analysis was criticized by Simion (2018a), who argued that a concept should be ameliorated only if doing so preserves epistemic accuracy. But, as I argue, this criticism misses Haslanger's target. In response, Podosky (2018) and McKenna (2018b) have argued that conceptual revisions need not preserve "epistemic accuracy" since concepts can "shape reality", not j…Read more
  •  7
    Disputatio Symposium on Sally Haslanger’s Work
    Disputatio 10 (50): 169-172. 2018.
    The articles collected in this symposium are result of the workshop Doing Justice to the Social, which was dedicated to the work of Sally Haslanger. The workshop took place at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona between the 6 and 8 June 2016. The workshop was also the 10th Meeting of the NOMOS Network for Practical Philosophy. The network meetings focus on philosophical issues connected with practical concerns, examined in an open-minded manner. This sympo- sium collects articles by Rachel…Read more
  •  24
    Does hate speech express hate?
    Justice Everywhere. 2022.
    In this post, Teresa Marques discusses her recent article in Journal of Applied Philosophy on whether hate is an essential component of hate speech. [blog post]
  •  327
    The expression of hate in hate speech
    Journal of Applied Philosophy 40 ((5)): 769-78. 2023.
    In this paper, I argue that hate speech expresses hate, and answer some objections to expressivist views. First, I briefly comment on some limitations of pragmatic accounts of harmful speech. I then present an expressive-normative view of derogatory discourse according to which it is expressive of an affective state by presupposing it. A linguistic act expressive of an affective state inherits the normativity that is constitutive of that state, as directed to its intentional object. If the act i…Read more
  •  14
    Relativismo y las retractaciones
    In David Pérez Chico (ed.), Cuestiones de la filosofía del lenguaje: pragmática, Prensas De La Universidad De Zaragoza. pp. 216-232. 2022.
    En este capítulo, tratar  el tema de las intuiciones basadas en las retractaciones, y argumentar  que tales intuiciones no favorecen lo que llamar relativismo de apreciaci n  (assessment relativism). Las intuiciones en que se basan las semanticas relativistas para los dominios del discurso en consideración conciernen a las retractaciones de afirmaciones pasadas que ocurren cuando el hablante ha cambiado su perspectiva (aunque los hechos independientes de las perspectivas del hablante sigan siend…Read more
  •  355
    Pode o Deflacionismo Negar o Princípio de Bivalência?
    Philosophica: International Journal for the History of Philosophy 14 (28): 227-244. 2006.
    Argumento que as tentativas que têm sido feitas para tornar a suposição da existência de contra-exemplos ao princípio de bivalência compatível com os esquemas deflacionistas para a verdade fracassam.
  •  118
    In this paper, I assess recent Stalnakerian views of communication in moral and normative domains. These views model context updates with normative claims. They also aim to explain how people disagree when they follow different norms or values. I present four problems for these Stalnakerian views. I conclude that the problems require a new conception of how common ground relates to illocutionary force and attitude mode, which is still lacking.
  •  13
    Collective Action, Philosophy and Law (edited book)
    Routledge. 2021.
    Collective Action, Philosophy and Law brings together two important strands of philosophical analysis. It combines general philosophical inquiry into collective agency with analyses of specific questions about plural entities and activities in the legal domain. These are issues of growing interest in areas of philosophy like action theory and social ontology, as well as in philosophy of law. The book contains thirteen original chapters written by an international team of leading philosophers and…Read more
  •  48
    Pejoratives & Oughts
    Philosophia 49 (3): 1109-1125. 2021.
    Chris Hom argued that slurs and pejoratives semantically express complex negative prescriptive properties, which are determined in virtue of standing in external causal relations to social ideologies and practices. He called this view Combinatorial Externalism. Additionally, he argued that Combinatorial Externalism entailed that slurs and pejoratives have null extensions. In this paper, I raise an objection that has not been raised in the literature so far. I argue that semantic theories like Ho…Read more
  •  636
    In this chapter, I try to answer the above question, and another question that it presupposes: can philosophy of language help us navigate the political news cycle? A reader can be sceptical of a positive answer to the latter question; after all, citizens, political theorists, and journalists seem to be capable of following current politics and its coverage in the news, and there is no reason to think that philosophy of language in particular should be capable of helping people make sense and re…Read more
  •  880
    Really expressive presuppositions and how to block them
    Grazer Philosophische Studien 97 (1): 138-158. 2020.
    Kaplan (1999) argued that a different dimension of expressive meaning (“use-conditional”, as opposed to truth-conditional) is required to characterize the meaning of pejoratives, including slurs and racial epithets. Elaborating on this, writers have argued that the expressive meaning of pejoratives and slurs is either a conventional implicature (Potts 2007) or a presupposition (Macià 2002 and 2014, Schlenker 2007, Cepollaro and Stojanovic 2016). We argue that an expressive presuppositional theor…Read more
  •  298
    Disagreement with a bald‐faced liar
    Ratio 33 (4): 255-268. 2020.
    How can we disagree with a bald-faced liar? Can we actively disagree if it is common ground that the speaker has no intent to deceive? And why do we disapprove of bald-faced liars so strongly? Bald-faced lies pose problems for accounts of lying and of assertion. Recent proposals try to defuse those problems by arguing that bald-faced lies are not really assertions, but rather performances of fiction-like scripts, or different types of language games. In this paper, I raise two objections to the …Read more
  •  620
    Recent years have seen an upsurge of inflammatory speech around the world. Understanding the mechanisms that correlate speech with violence is a necessary step to explore the most effective forms of counterspeech. This paper starts with a review of the features of dangerous speech and ideology, as formulated by Jonathan Maynard and Susan Benesch. It then offers a conceptual framework to analyze some of the underlying linguistic mechanisms at play: derogatory language, code words, figleaves, and …Read more
  •  131
    Concepts stand at the centre of human cognition. We use concepts in categorizing objects and events in the world, in reasoning and action, and in social interaction. It is therefore not surprising that the study of concepts constitutes a central area of research in philosophy and psychology, yet only recently have the two disciplines developed greater interaction. Recent experiments in psychology that test the role of concepts in categorizing and reasoning have found a great deal of variation, a…Read more
  •  29
    The articles collected in this symposium are result of the workshop Doing Justice to the Social, which was dedicated to the work of Sally Haslanger. The workshop took place at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona between the 6 and 8 June 2016. The workshop was also the 10th Meeting of the NOMOS Network for Practical Philosophy. The network meetings focus on philosophical issues connected with practical concerns, examined in an open-minded manner. This sympo- sium collects articles by Rachel…Read more
  •  643
    This paper presents reasons against semantic relativism. Semantic relativism is motivated by intuitions that are presumed to raise problems for traditional or contextualist semantics in contested domains of discourse. Intuition-based arguments are those based on competent speakers’ putative intuitions about seeming faultless disagreement, eavesdropper, and retraction cases. I will organize the discussion in three parts. First, I shall provide a brief introduction to the intuition-based arguments…Read more
  •  1089
    Amelioration vs. Perversion
    In Teresa Marques & Åsa Wikforss (eds.), Shifting Concepts: The Philosophy and Psychology of Conceptual Variability, Oxford University Press. 2020.
    Words change meaning, usually in unpredictable ways. But some words’ meanings are revised intentionally. Revisionary projects are normally put forward in the service of some purpose – some serve specific goals of inquiry, and others serve ethical, political or social aims. Revisionist projects can ameliorate meanings, but they can also pervert. In this paper, I want to draw attention to the dangers of meaning perversions, and argue that the self-declared goodness of a revisionist project doesn’t…Read more
  •  1
    Editorial
    Disputatio 9 (44): 1-4. 2017.
    We are pleased to announce that the University of Lisbon has signed an agreement with De Gruyter publishers for the open access publication of Disputatio. With De Gruyter Online academic publishing, all articles will be freely available online and assigned a DOI. Disputatio is now starting a new cycle, and during the summer of 2017 its editorship will be transferred from Teresa Marques and Célia Teixeira to Ricardo Santos (U Lisboa) and Elia Zardini (U Lisboa). We wish to thank the managing edi…Read more
  •  481
    Hybrid Dispositionalism and the Law
    In Toh Kevin, Plunkett David & Shapiro Scott (eds.), Dimensions of Normativity: New Essays on Metaethics and Jurisprudence, Oxford University Press. 2019.
    Dworkin’s famous argument from legal disagreements poses a problem for legal positivism by undermining the idea that the law can be (just) the result of the practice and attitudes of norm-applying officials. In recent work, the chapter author argued that a hybrid contextualist theory paired with a dispositional theory of value—a hybrid dispositionalism, for short—offers the resources to respond to similar disagreement- based arguments in other evaluative and normative domains. This chapter claim…Read more
  •  608
    Retractions
    Synthese 195 (8): 3335-3359. 2018.
    Intuitions about retractions have been used to motivate truth relativism about certain types of claims. Among these figure epistemic modals, knowledge attributions, or personal taste claims. On MacFarlane’s prominent relativist proposal, sentences like “the ice cream might be in the freezer” or “Pocoyo is funny” are only assigned a truth-value relative to contexts of utterance and contexts of assessment. Retractions play a crucial role in the argument for assessment-relativism. A retraction of a…Read more
  •  72
    Pejorative Discourse is not Fictional
    Thought: A Journal of Philosophy (4): 1-14. 2017.
    Hom and May (2015) argue that pejoratives mean negative prescriptive properties that externally depend on social ideologies, and that this entails a form of fictionalism: pejoratives have null extensions. There are relevant uses of fictional terms that are necessary to describe the content of fictions, and to make true statements about the world, that do not convey that speakers are committed to the fiction. This paper shows that the same constructions with pejoratives typically convey that the …Read more
  •  560
    What metalinguistic negotiations can't do
    Phenomenology and Mind (12): 40-48. 2017.
    Philosophers of language and metaethicists are concerned with persistent normative and evaluative disagreements – how can we explain persistent intelligible disagreements in spite of agreement over the described facts? Tim Sundell recently argued that evaluative aesthetic and personal taste disputes could be explained as metalinguistic negotiations – conversations where interlocutors negotiate how best to use a word relative to a context. I argue here that metalinguistic negotiations are neither…Read more
  •  536
    Nomes Vazios
    Compêndio Em Linha de Problemas de Filosofia Analítica. 2014.
    Os nomes próprios são termos singulares que intuitivamente indicam os objectos do discurso ou pensamento. Alguns nomes falham na sua função de referir, sem que, aparentemente, deixem de desempenhar um papel representacional. Isso é paradoxal: Por um lado, os objectos referidos deveriam fazer parte de uma caracterização correcta dos nomes próprios. Por outro lado, o significado das frases que incorporam nomes vácuos sugere que tais objectos são extrínsecos aos pensamentos transmitidos. Isto é o p…Read more
  •  105
    This is not an instance of (E)
    Synthese 195 (3). 2018.
    Semantic paradoxes like the liar are notorious challenges to truth theories. A paradox can be phrased with minimal resources and minimal assumptions. It is not surprising, then, that the liar is also a challenge to minimalism about truth. Horwich (1990) deals swiftly with the paradox, after discriminating between other strategies for avoiding it without compromising minimalism. He dismisses the denial of classical logic, the denial that the concept of truth can coherently be applied to propositi…Read more
  •  259
    Doxastic Disagreement
    Erkenntnis 79 (S1): 121-142. 2014.
    This paper explores some alternative accounts of doxastic disagreement, and shows what problems each faces. It offers an account of doxastic disagreement that results from the incompatibility of the content of doxastic attitudes, even when that content’s truth is relativized. On the best definition possible, it is argued, neither non-indexical contextualism nor assessment-relativism have an advantage over contextualism. The conclusion is that conflicts that arise from the incompatibility (at the…Read more
  •  247
    Disagreement about Taste: Commonality Presuppositions and Coordination
    Australasian Journal of Philosophy 92 (4): 701-723. 2014.
    The paper confronts the disagreement argument for relativism about matters of taste, defending a specific form of contextualism. It is first considered whether the disagreement data might manifest an inviariantist attitude speakers pre-reflectively have. Semantic and ontological enlightenment should then make the impressions of disagreement vanish, or at least leave them as lingering ineffectual Müller-Lyer-like illusions; but it is granted to relativists that this does not fully happen. López d…Read more
  •  4018
    É o Género uma Construção Social?
    In A. P. Mesquita, C. Beckert, J. L. Pérez & Xavier M. L. L. O. (eds.), A Paixão da Razão. Homenagem a Maria Luísa Ribeiro Ferreira, Centro De Filosofia Da Universidade De Lisboa. pp. 561-578. 2014.
    É muitas vezes aceite que certas categorias, tipicamente as de género, raça, orientação sexual ou doença mental, são construções sociais e não divisões naturais no mundo. A distinção entre categorias naturais e categorias sociais, como pretende ser a distinção entre o sexo e o género, tem servido no âmbito da crítica e ciência social para advogar a abolição de certas normas sociais, e para a implementação de políticas mais equitativas. Contudo, há aspectos centrais do construtivismo que são pouc…Read more
  •  346
    Aesthetic Predicates: A Hybrid Dispositional Account
    Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 59 (6). 2016.
    This paper explores the possibility of developing a hybrid version of dispositional theories of aesthetic values. On such a theory, uses of aesthetic predicates express relational second-order dispositional properties. If the theory is not absolutist, it allows for the relativity of aesthetic values. But it may be objected to on the grounds that it fails to explain disagreement among subjects who are not disposed alike. This paper explores the possibility of adapting recent proposals of hybrid …Read more
  •  139
    The relevance of causal social construction
    Journal of Social Ontology 3 (1). 2017.
    Social constructionist claims are surprising and interesting when they entail that presumably natural kinds are in fact socially constructed. The claims are interesting because of their theoretical and political importance. Authors like Díaz-León argue that constitutive social construction is more relevant for achieving social justice than causal social construction. This paper challenges this claim. Assuming there are socially salient groups that are discriminated against, the paper presents a …Read more
  •  145
    We can't have no satisfaction
    Filosofia Unisinos 17 (3): 308-314. 2016.
    Many authors agree that there is a dimension of conflict expressed through discourse that eludes purely semantic approaches. How and why do conative attitudes conflict? The latter question is the object of this paper. Conflicts of attitudes are typically modelled on one of two models. The first imposes a Subjective Rationality constraint on conflicting attitudes, and the second depends on the impossibility of Joint Satisfaction. This paper assesses whether either of the two conditions can accoun…Read more